The New York Times film critic, Bosley Crowther, panned the film and also gave the producers some advice. He wrote, "Something of the same drollery that was displayed by William Powell in his saturnine performance of Nick Charles in the Thin Man films is flashed by him on a few occasions in the Rivoli's new Take One False Step, a curiously mixed-up mystery picture which Chester Erskine produced, directed and helped to write. But for the most part our erstwhile detective and comedian is forced to play a role of rather painful proportions with forbidding austerity in this film ... a little more of Miss Winters—as an active participant, that is—might have rendered a rather drab picture more decorative, at least."[2]